


A Tree in a Storm (Or: eight things that never happened to Ginny Weasley)

by anythingbutgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, background harry/ginny sort of, ginny/agency otp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11988972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrey/pseuds/anythingbutgrey
Summary: It is a very quiet year when Ron goes to Hogwarts. Above all things, Ginny is used to him, used to the noise of a brother in this too-large, crumbling house.





	A Tree in a Storm (Or: eight things that never happened to Ginny Weasley)

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2011. Archiving here.

  


**1.** It is a very quiet year when Ron goes to Hogwarts. Above all things, Ginny is used to him, used to the noise of a brother in this too-large, crumbling house. The twins still write her letters and that she is their favorite is a commonly known fact, but Ron is something special. He is the person who has always been there, the one who would roll eyes with her over their mother's antics, the one who would play hide and seek long after he outgrew it (or thought he outgrew it, as the case might have been), the one who seemed fixed to the house with her. But then he goes to school and she's left with the house and the beaten down owl and _Molly_ , and she worries that maybe she will always be stuck.

 **2.** Tom Riddle crawls into her. She can feel him under her skin for days before she figures out the blackouts or the stains on her hands. In the pages, she writes, _Why_. And he writes back, _Because it was so easy._

 **2a.** Ginny never stops having nightmares. She tells Neville. She doesn't tell Harry. Harry is a superstar. Harry is blind. Harry has his own shit, and Ginny doesn't think he even knows how to carry anyone else's weight. She could hate him. Maybe she should. Neville thinks she should. But hate would be so very easy, and Ginny imagines she's always been hard.

 **3.** The war is cold. All of Britain descends into winter too early that year. Maybe it's just Hogwarts, but to Ginny the entire country seems frozen over.

"I've never thought of myself as a soldier," Neville says, when it's quiet, and just the two of them. Luna is part of them but outside of them. She's their light. But sometimes Neville and Ginny live in the dark.

Ginny looks into the distance of the Common Room, where her fellow Gryffindors are studying, laughing, looking at her and Neville out of the corners of their eyes. Everyone has bags under their eyes these days, even the laughing children by the fireplace. Ginny images that she and Neville, who look the worst for all this wear, appear to be co-conspirators, always huddled in the corners of the room with their secrets. Which, she supposes, they are. She's just not sure how they haven't been found out yet.

"I don't know," Ginny says. "I could be a soldier. I've always been a fighter. But those aren't the same thing."

Neville shrugs, doodles a snitch on the corner of his Herbology textbook. "It'll get you through."

And it does. There is infiltration and there are too many close calls, but it gets her by. Even when Neville has to disappear to the Room of Requirement and she has to spend her evenings in the Common Room by herself, she gets by. All the same, she feels like half a shadow. People don't even notice her when she walks by, and when they speak to her it is with surprise, as though they didn't see her. She spends more nights in the Room of Requirement than she should. Her roommates don't miss her.

"Do you ever think about after?" Ginny asks. "After the war, what you'll do?"

Neville runs a hand through his hair. "I try not to. It distracts."

Ginny nods. She knows that. It's best to be present. Thinking about the future, about the possible, it leads to trouble. Part of war means being willing to die for the cause, and Ginny is willing to do that. She will lay her body down. It's hard to do that when she pictures herself in the aftermath, in the ruin but in the sun. It's best not to think about it.

"But," Neville continues, and Ginny looks over to him and his absent gaze across the room to the windowless walls. "But I do think about it sometimes. It's a sort of hazy picture in my head."

He looks to her. Ginny swallows. "What do you see?" she asks, as though this were divination, as though Neville could spell out the end of the line.

Neville kisses her then, too quickly and too hard and she doesn't care, she bites back, presses her hands against his back under his shirt, short nails trying to claw their way into him, to hold on tight to the flesh of him. When they have sex, Neville doesn't say her name, doesn't say it once, but instead he says, _you, you, you,_ and it sounds like bells calling out the time.

 **4.** It doesn't matter, in the end. Ginny is dutiful. Ginny falls into line, and what has become expected of her is a warm summer wedding to Harry James Potter. She doesn't tell Neville about the engagement, lets him find out about the wedding through an invitation in the mail, though of course he would already know from the article in the Prophet. He sends his regrets.

 **5.** Harry names the children. Harry has lists of names, and recites them to her growing stomach rather than to her, like the child could choose for itself. They are awkward names, names of heroes, names of the brave. Ginny is brave, she has heard, but apparently not enough to suggest that perhaps Albus Severus is not the best name for a child. She and Neville laugh about it on one of their bimonthly lunches at his house.

"It's terrible to laugh at your children, you know," Neville pretends to scold her before dessert.

Ginny feigns a gasp. "I would never. He will be Al and can blame his father for any teasing that should occur."

"Well, we would never want to put Harry Potter in a poor light," Neville says. It falls flat, and presses the smile off her face. She takes a sip of water.

"I am sorry," she says. She has already given all the excuses. They have grown tired. The truth is that Ginny is a coward, and has always been a coward in ways private enough to keep her labeled in the public mind as brave. Ginny finds this laughable. Ginny doesn't know if she has ever been brave. Wasn't brave enough to take the man who loved her, wasn't brave enough to stand her ground, wasn't brave enough to be her own woman with her own life. Ginny has long since been a soldier, but she is no longer brave.

"Me too," Neville murmurs. "Me too."

 **6.** There is another war.

"There was always going to be another war," Hermione says mostly to herself, as though she should have known. Maybe she should have. Ginny feels sick.

The four of them are in her kitchen: Hermione, Harry, Ron, Ginny. Well, it's really the three of them and then her by herself, as has been the case with her marriage over the last twenty years and, she imagines, will be the case for the rest of her days. Harry looks past her to Hermione. Ginny is used to this as well. There have been many fights over this.

"Where do we start?" Harry asks.

Hermione shakes her head. "We plan."

Hermione is a soldier, battle-ready, tough as steel. There's a place she and Harry will end up at, someplace quiet and dark and never buried, and when they're there no one else can touch them. "It's because of the woods," Ron will say, somber, having surrendered. But Ginny is the one who has always felt lost between the trees.

 **7.** They survive. It seems impossible, or at least statistically improbable, for the four of them to make it through, but they do. But they don't come out the same. Ginny comes out of it shaken, mixed up, put together in the wrong order. People have died in this war. Ginny has killed people in this war. Harry tries to touch her and she cries.

So she goes to Neville's. It almost seems accidental. She meant to apparate to the Burrow and instead she ends up on his doorstep. He opens the door before she can vanish again, and stares at her, open-mouthed. They haven't seen each other since the start of the war. He disappeared to some eastern front and she stayed here, home, whatever that word means. And it has been a long war. He looks older than his years, but she probably does too.

"You," Neville says, and the word seems to slip out of his mouth like a hush. He steps to her and takes her hand. Then, he is kissing her or she is kissing him and Ginny digs her heels into the dirt of the earth and thinks, _Stay._

 **8.** Ginny is happy. The word washes over her, clings to her like pollen stuck to windows in spring. Ginny has a daughter and names her Sofia. She seems too old for such a thing, but those Weasley genes, she supposes, will get her far. And it's not that she loves her other children any less, it is just that Sofia is part of a life that feels like hers, not someone else's. Neville plays with Sofia in the garden, overrun with rose bushes and bright green trees. There are no more wars, and far fewer nightmares. It is quiet. Ginny folds into the obscurity of her own life. She wouldn't change it for the world.


End file.
